Search form

The Impact of Federal Involvement in America’s Classrooms

Committee on Education & the Workforce
United States House of Representatives

Chairman Kline, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting
me to speak with you today. My name is Andrew Coulson and I direct
the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a
nonprofit, non-partisan public policy research organization. My
comments are my own, and do not represent any position of the
Institute.

For over half a century, a succession of Congresses and
presidents has sought to do two things for American elementary and
secondary education: raise overall achievement, and narrow the gaps
between high- and low-income students as well as between minority
and white students. The federal government has spent roughly $2
trillion on these efforts since 1965, adjusting for
inflation.1

In the next few minutes I will summarize the results of these
efforts and their implications for federal education policy.

Congress’ first attempt to improve the quality of instruction in
the nation’s schools was the National Defense Education Act of
1958, a direct response to the Soviet launch of the satellite
Sputnik. It was intended to raise mathematics and science
achievement. There are no data on science achievement during this
period to my knowledge, but we do have nationally representative
trend data for mathematics performance at the end of high school,
which I present in Figure 1.

As can be seen from the chart, math scores declined slightly
during the latter half of the 1950s, and this decline accelerated
from 1960 to 1966, after the NDEA was passed. Scores had still not
recovered to their 1955 high point three decades later.

While the up-trend between 1966 and 1983 looks promising, it was
not sustained. Figure 2 charts the percent change in Math, Science,
and Reading scores from the 1970s to the present, along with the
percent change in real federal education spending per pupil.

Math and Reading scores at the end of high school are unchanged
over the past forty years, while Science scores suffered a slight
decline through the year 1999, the last time that test was
administered. Data from another nationally representative test
series show a continuing decline in 12th grade Science between 1996
and 2005, the last year for which we have trend
data.2

Presented with stagnant or declining performance in the face of
a meteoric rise in federal spending per pupil, it is reasonable to
ask: what happened to total spending? If state and local
expenditures fell to such an extent that they offset federal
increases, that might explain the profound disconnect revealed in
Figure 2.

To answer that question, I present Figure 3, showing how the
total cost of an entire k-through-12 public school education has
changed over time.

We spent over $151,000 per student sending the graduating class
of 2009 through public schools. That is nearly three times as much
as we spent on the graduating class of 1970, adjusting for
inflation. Despite that massive real spending increase, overall
achievement has stagnated or declined, depending on the
subject.

But what of the federal government’s other educational goal:
narrowing the achievement gaps by income and minority status? Test
score breakdowns by family income are not available, but we do have
something close: a breakdown by parents’ level of education. This
allows us to compare the children of high school dropouts to those
of college graduates. In Reading and Science, the gap between these
students has not narrowed in 40 years. In Math it has narrowed by
barely one percent of the test score scale.3 So, here
again, federal appropriations and the programs they have funded
have failed to achieve their goals.

That leaves us with one last federal policy goal to examine:
Shrinking the gaps between minority and white students. In science,
these gaps, too, are unchanged,4 while they have
narrowed in Reading and Mathematics. But a key question remains:
were federal programs responsible for this isolated gap
narrowing?

If so, the gap narrowing that did occur should track federal
legislation and spending: starting gradually and then accelerating
rapidly during the past two decades. To see if that is indeed the
pattern, Figure 4 charts changes in the black/white Reading gap
(which is one of the larger majority/minority gap reductions, with
a fairly typical time trend).

Comparing Figure 4 with the federal spending per pupil trend
shown in Figure 2, there seems to be little support for the
hypothesis that federal efforts have narrowed the black/white
reading gap. The gap was essentially unchanged for the first 15
years after the passage of the ESEA and Head Start. Then, in the
absence of any dramatic change in federal policy or spending, the
gap suddenly narrowed between 1980 and 1988. Since 1988, the gap
has actually widened slightly, despite a dramatic rise in
federal spending over that period. The patterns for both math and
reading for both black and Hispanic students tell similar
stories.5

To sum up, we have little to show for the $2 trillion in federal
education spending of the past half century. In the face of
concerted and unflagging efforts by Congress and the states, public
schooling has suffered a massive productivity collapse — it
now costs three times as much to provide essentially the same
education as we provided in 1970.

Grim as that picture may seem, it fails to capture the full
measure of the problem. Because as productivity was
falling relentlessly in education, it was rising
everywhere else. A pound of grocery store coffee is not merely as
affordable as it was in 1970 — it hasn’t just held its ground
— it is cheaper in real dollars. Indeed virtually
every product and service has gotten better, or more affordable, or
both over the past two generations.

Seen in that proper context, we would have to be disappointed
with our nation’s lack of educational improvement even if federal
spending had not increased at all. The fact that outcomes have
remained flat or declined while spending skyrocketed is a disaster
unparalleled in any other field. The only thing it appears to have
accomplished is to apply the brakes to the nation’s economic
growth, by taxing trillions of dollars out of the productive sector
of the economy and spending it on ineffective programs.

But amidst this bleak overall record, there is one federal
education program that has been proven to both improve educational
outcomes and dramatically lower costs. That is the Washington, DC
Opportunity Scholarships Program. Research conducted by the
Department of Education finds that students attending private
schools thanks to this program have equal or better academic
performance than their peers in the local public schools, and have
significantly higher graduation rates. This, and very high levels
of parental satisfaction, come at an average per pupil cost of
around $7,000. By contrast, per pupil spending on k-12 public
education in the nation’s capital was roughly $28,000 during the
2008-09 school year.6

The OSP program is thus producing better results at a quarter
the cost.

DC, of course, is a special case. The federal government is not
empowered by the Constitution to create such a program on a
national level. Indeed the Constitution delegates to the federal
government no national education policy powers, reserving them,
under the 10th Amendment, to the states and the people. Clearly,
this limit has not been observed for generations, but its wisdom is
by now inescapable. We have decades of evidence of the inability of
our national education programs to fulfill their worthy
intentions.

Nevertheless, Congress could contribute greatly to the spread of
educational excellence around the nation by preserving and growing
the Opportunity Scholarships Program as an example of what is
possible and by phasing out its vast array of ineffective programs.
This would ultimately allow for a permanent annual tax cut on the
order of seventy billion dollars, and would bolster interest in the
many state level private school choice programs that have also been
improving outcomes while lowering costs. Any move in this direction
would be of lasting value to American families and the American
economy.

1. Calculated by the author from Table no. 373 of the 2009
edition (latest available) of the Digest of Education
Statistics, linearly interpolating data gaps prior to 1985 and
linearly extrapolating the 2010 value from the preceding ten years
of data. The resulting figure is: $2,070,963,000,000, in constant
2009 dollars.

2. National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s
Report Card: Science 2009, (NCES 2011-451), Institute of
Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2011.
http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2009/ [The “Nation’s Report
Card” is a separate set of nationally representative tests from the
“Long Term Trends” set, but both are part of the “National
Assessment of Educational Progress.”]

6. The figures in the range of $15,000 for DC per pupil spending
that are commonly reported in the press are several years out of
date, do not take into account falling DCPS enrollment in the face
of rising total spending in the years since they were published,
and usually exclude major expenditure categories such as capital
spending. The $28,000 figure is the author’s own calculation from
the published FY2008-09 budget documents of the District of
Columbia, and the spreadsheet in which those calculations were
conducted, including source citations, is available here:
https://www.cato.org/wp-content/uploads/Coulson-DC-Ed-Spending-FY2009-Budget.xls